T he Inn of the Fig was a step or two grander than the kind of establishment where I normally made my living. The maidservants wore neat gowns and clean aprons and for the most part looked indignant if you thumped them on the hip after they brought your drinks. The wine was subtler, the tapers beeswax instead of smoky tallow, the trestle tables clean-scrubbed rather than sticky with wine, and the crowd of dusty traveling pilgrims and habitual gamblers had a greater sprinkling of velvet-clad boys escaping their tutors for a little noisy fun among the cards and commoners. Accordingly I bought a new shirt and polished my boots, brought a seldom-worn cap of faded velvet from the chest at the foot of my bed, as well as a few rings for my stubby fingers that weren’t silver but looked real enough, and for three weeks came nightly to the Inn of the Fig to play dice, zara, and all the other games of chance that I normally scorned. I ordered wine that I pretended to drink and ordered rounds that my fellow players drank to the dregs, and through it all I kept my ears open.

A tricky business, asking questions over a hand of cards. One had to time the questions after wine had begun to loosen tongues, but before it had addled wits; after the game’s cards had been dealt, but before the tensity of the final hands set in. Men flushed with victory and money were quickest to talk, and I spent three weeks losing coin and gritting my teeth as my opponents made jests about little men who were short in luck as well as stature.

My heart thumped the first night I saw a man with a bull on his livery, and an uproarious game of zara got me the information that he worked in the household of Cardinal Borgia. But in came three more guardsmen bearing the Borgia bull, and over that night and the next I learned that they were all far too newly arrived in Rome to be the men I sought: hired just this past week from the country, to guard the Cardinal’s palazzo and the Palazzo Montegiordano, where he kept his not-so-secret cache of bastard children. All over Rome churchmen and noblemen alike were hiring more guards. Pope Innocent was sinking fast; every rumor reported him nearer death’s door, and everyone knew the city would erupt in chaos the moment he died. Rome always did at the death of her Holy Father.

Still—“That’s what I saw the guardsman wearing,” the hard-faced maidservant had nodded when I showed her a sketch of the Borgia livery with its red bull. “What kind of emblem is that for a man of God, I ask you? He won’t be Pope next, not with a sigil like that. Cardinal Piccolomini, he’s the one leading the odds now. Or Cardinal Sforza . . .”